Preview

Preview

Saturday 24 March 2007 11.15 EDT
First published on Saturday 24 March 2007 11.15 EDT

It's shiny, black and pleasantly monolithic standing on its end in your living room. It's also four months late, features less backwards compatibility than Japanese and US models, costs £425 and has a set of launch games you'd be pressed to find all that inspiring. Coming with the world's cheapest Blu-Ray DVD player, it also supplies the photo and music sorting abilities that now appear to be fitted on every single electronic device. The wireless but flimsy-feeling controllers are outwardly similar to their PS2 predecessors and lack the ability to vibrate while giving players tilt control in some games. As a launch package, PS3 is quite the curate's egg.

MOTORSTORM Playing Motorstorm quickly reminds you where all your money went - it looks beautiful, even if the dirt track racing punctuates fun with frustration, rewarding tiny last lap slips with fifth place.

VIRTUA FIGHTER 5 Having left old adversary Tekken for dead long ago, the king of fighting games is back, resplendent in its graphical makeover, and adding two new characters to its monumentally solid mechanics.

RESISTANCE: FALL OF MAN This first person shooter is about aliens invading - this time rather quaintly via northern England - and improves radically as you go on.

RIDGE RACER 7 Yet more racing game competence from Namco and the latest addition to a series that all but stopped evolving many years ago. If you love Ridge Racer, you'll find this is absolutely the usual.

VIRTUA TENNIS 3 A handful of surreal mini games don't disguise what is still easily the best tennis game available, albeit one that demands slightly more skill and effort from players than its older brothers did.

CALL OF DUTY 3 When it came out on Xbox 360 this felt a bit tired; on Wii it was disastrous. Here it's a decent game that doesn't at any time threaten Resistance: Fall Of Man's position as PS3's flagship shooter.

· All games £40, out now

Coming soon...

PlayStation Home: Like a cross between the dull but very well publicised Second Life and Xbox Live, PlayStation Home will give you a customisable avatar, a flat and public areas to meet fellow PS3 owners.

Little Big Planet: This beautifully constructed and exquisitely chaotic physics platform game will let players create and share their own levels in what may turn out to be the PS3's first killer application - a game so good it forces you to buy the console.